When his partner is killed by the mysterious and possibly nonexistent Jaguar Shark, Steve Zissou and his Team Zissou crew set off for an expedition to hunt down the creature. Along with his estranged wife, a beautiful journalist and a co-pilot who could possibly be Zissou's son, the crew set off for one wild expedition. Written by FilmFanUK

Steve Zissou, sea-film auteur a la Jacques Cousteau, has reason to be melancholy: his partner has been eaten, perhaps by a mythic jaguar shark, his wife may be taking up with her ex-husband, a young man appears claiming Steve is his father (Steve hates fathers), his most recent films have tanked, he's having trouble raising money for his venture to revenge his partner, and he's attracted to a pregnant reporter who prefers the pretender. At sea, in pursuit of the shark, will he escape pirates and mutiny, forge the bonds of fatherhood, place his arm around his wife, find the monster of the deep, re-establish box office hegemony, and discover a reason to smile? Written by jhailey@hotmail.com

While making a documentary, the famous oceanographer Steve Zissou loses his dear friend, eaten by a jaguar shark. He raises funds for an expedition in his ship Belafonte to hunt the shark and make a new film. The journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson and a pilot that claims to be his unknown son, Ned Plimpton, join his crew in their journey, planned by his wife Eleanor Zissou. While making the movie, they are attacked by pirates and left without any money to finish their work. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

WES ADERSON TACKLES ADVETURE: ABOUT THE SCREEPLAY

“You’re supposed to be my son, right?”
“I don’t know, but I did want to meet you, just in case.”

With just three films—“Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore” and “The Royal
Tenenbaums”—Wes Anderson has established a comically charged yet deeply human view of modern life and relationships. Each of his broadly appealing comedies has tackled recurring themes of aspiration, misfits, family, love and the fall from grace. His
fourth film takes these same themes into wholly new territory as Anderson simultaneously tackles an ocean-going adventure rife with chases, shoot-outs, preying sharks and underwater wonders.
In a sense, THE LIFE AQUATIC became Anderson’s own expedition into the
unknown. Barry Mendel explains: “Wes took some wild risks in making this movie. He essentially threw out the ‘Wes Anderson book’ and reinvented himself. Far from the very
precise chamber pieces of ‘Rushmore’ or ‘The Royal Tenenbaums,’ he’s thrown himself
into a chaotic, exterior, fantastical genre film.”

Anderson’s novel-like screenplays always emerge from intimate personal
experience and at the center of THE LIFE AQUATIC is another character close to
Anderson’s heart: Steve Zissou, a world-famous oceanographer who is both comically
familiar and entirely unique. Long fascinated by aquatic films and undersea life in
general, Anderson had always wanted to make a movie set on a boat in the world of
adventure filmmaking. “This is a movie I’ve been thinking about for fourteen years,” he
comments. “I’ve always been fascinated by this strange and amazing character who
creates a kind of eccentric family at sea.”
As early as his college years, Anderson penned a short story about an
oceanographer that introduced Steve Zissou, his boat The Belafonte and the wife who
turns out to be the real brains behind his operation. From there, the character continued to
evolve over the years, as Anderson continued to ponder the personality and plight of
Steve Zissou and at last began to collaborate on a screenplay with his long-time friend
Noah Baumbach, a writer and director (“Kicking and Screaming”) who also writes comic
pieces for The New Yorker. Meeting at the same New York restaurant day after day,
Anderson and Baumbach fleshed out the story not only of Zissou, but also of his crew of
fellow dreamers who set out to sea with him. As they wrote the action-packed story of
Team Zissou, their explorations of the characters brought the story’s undercurrents to the
surface.

“Steve Zissou is someone whose entire modus operandi in life is to create a team,
to always be surrounded by a group of people who will go with him on his adventures,”
explains Anderson. “But now he’s reached a point in his life where he’s already done a
lot of his work, where he’s been married a couple of times, and suddenly, it all seems to
be slipping away.”
“So the story is about Steve Zissou, this band of adventurers that he brings
together and the mission that they go on in search of a creature that may or may not exist.
And, at the same time, it’s about a guy who is at a low point in his career and is trying to
reach for something greater than he’s ever done before—to reaffirm himself. And when
he meets somebody who might be his son, that suddenly brings him back in touch with
some things he’s lost contact with, as well as questions he hasn’t asked himself in a long
time, and changes the whole journey.”
The screenplay went beyond anything Anderson had previously done in terms of
inventing an entire world that follows its own slightly off-kilter rules of reality. When
producer Barry Mendel read an early draft of THE LIFE AQUATIC, he was quickly
drawn into the totally enveloping fictional world Anderson and Baumbach had created.

“The level of detail and the amount of emotional layers and the sophistication of
the dialogue in that first draft was terrific,” says Mendel. “Wes’s verbal dexterity and
ability to shift cadences and ideas in a heartbeat is something that doesn’t really exist
outside of his movies. It’s something that I think people almost take for granted in a Wes
Anderson movie—that the dialogue will be brilliant—but he takes it to the next level in
this film with lines that are constantly funny, revealing and memorable.”
Continues Mendel, “The screenplay really reflects the amount of fun that Wes and
Noah had writing it. It takes you into a completely rambunctious, alive and energetic
world filled with wonderful characters.”

The script ultimately brought to life not only Steve Zissou’s subtle personal
transformation as he approaches fatherhood and posterity but an imaginative, whimsical
undersea world even more eccentric, mercurial and magical than the real thing. “In the
film, we wanted to show the way Steve Zissou sees this underwater world that he loves,
that has so much magic and surprise to him, that draws him into a whole other reality,”
explains Anderson. “I mean, we’re now all so used to seeing amazing underwater
photography from flipping through the cable channels and we knew we couldn’t compete
with that. So we went the opposite route, trying to rely almost entirely on our
imaginations. So as Noah and I were writing, we would be thinking about what creatures
the team would come across, and we might start with just a stingray, but then we would
say, how about a stingray with constellations on it that are glowing—and it developed
from there.”
From the beginning, Wes Anderson decided that rather than create this world with
lavish, high-tech digital technology, he’d go back in time instead, to some of
filmmaking’s oldest and most classic techniques of forging creatures, emphasizing the
pure pleasures of stop-motion animation.
“I wanted a handmade look to the film,” he says. “There’s a real personality to
these old techniques and there’s a feeling of craft that’s very different from what you get
when you do things digitally. I’ve always admired Henry Selick’s work and I knew he
would bring a great deal of artistry to the film. It just has the right quality for this story. I
couldn’t imagine going too high-tech to tell the story of Team Zissou and their
adventures on The Belafonte.”
Barry Mendel comments, “It was a completely bold concept to make a movie
about an oceanographer with completely fake fish. We knew nothing like it had ever been
done. But I think Wes was also very savvy in immediately recognizing that the undersea
world has been captured so magnificently by filmmakers already that he needed to come
up with a completely different idea. He creates a unique undersea world in the same way
he created a unique New York-ish city for ‘The Royal Tenenbaums.’ It’s fun to realize
that all of the creatures and coral reefs in the film are entirely invented for the film and
brought to life with the help of great designers, construction people, painters and a whole
stop-motion animation unit that has put together something that is from the human
imagination.”

Anderson’s risk-taking continued in the film’s casting as he looked for actors
willing to break entirely away from any preconceived molds—casting Bill Murray in his
most wide-ranging and emotionally vulnerable role yet; asking Owen Wilson to make a
180-turn from his laid-back, irony-driven characters to take a completely opposite role;
having the typically intense Willem Dafoe try a pure comedic role; plucking world-class
actor Michael Gambon from the stage to play fading impresario Oseary Drakoulias; and
allowing Brazilian actor Seu Jorge (“City of God”) to blossom in unforeseen directions in
the musical role of Pele Dos Santos.

MEET TEAM ZISSOU
“We’re being led on a suicide mission by a selfish maniac.”
— Anne-Marie Sakowitz

At the heart of any Wes Anderson movie are the characters and—even with the
emphasis on fast-moving adventure and comedy in THE LIFE AQUATIC—the
characters remain the engine that drives the film. Starting with Steve Zissou—who wears
his own oversized ego like a crown yet faces moments where he pleads to his crew,

“Don’t you guys like me anymore?”—and continuing down through his entire ragtag
crew and assorted enemies, each person has his or her own human complexities that
emerge when the going gets tough. The characters include:

Steve Zissou
From the very start of writing THE LIFE AQUATIC, Wes Anderson knew that
Academy Award® nominee Bill Murray would be Steve Zissou. “Not only is Bill one of
my favorite actors, but I know from experience he is someone who allows you to do
things differently,” explains Anderson. “He’s somebody who has the advantage of being
totally uninhibited and at the same time can get everybody around him caught up in his
mood. I knew it would be really interesting to see Bill throw himself into playing
somebody who is not only energetic and funny but also tormented, angry and very
agitated.”
Producer Barry Mendel adds, “Having worked with Bill in ‘Rushmore’ and ‘The
Royal Tenenbaums,’ I think it was always Wes’s hope to write a movie for Bill that
would really showcase a lot of what he believes Bill can do—and I think they both
became very excited about the role of Steve Zissou for exactly that reason. Bill has
always had a natural affinity for Wes’s dialogue, but here he gives such a naturalistic and
honest performance that he provides the audience with the illusion that it comes easily.”
Coming off the acclaim and Best Actor Oscar® nomination he received for “Lost
in Translation,” Murray was drawn in by taking on a very different kind of leading role
than anything he had ever done—a literal “man of action,” a bold adventurer, filmmaker
and hero, albeit one forced to come face-to-face with his own growing powerlessness. In
playing Steve Zissou, Murray knew he would have to approach an oceanic force of a
man—with emotions that swing from the ecstatically funny to the profoundly sad, but
also linger in the vast zone in between. Murray was further intrigued by the screenplay’s
wide-ranging ambitions.
“This thing really screams,” sums up Murray about the screenplay. “There’s just
an enormous amount of material in THE LIFE AQUATIC—dialogue, action, visuals,
humor and emotion that all come at you in quick bursts. It’s also the biggest movie I’ve
ever done in terms of production scope, much bigger than ‘Ghostbusters,’ even. And it
really creates its own view of a world at sea.”
Adding to the comedy-inflected pathos of Murray’s performance as Steve Zissou
was the fact that in order to play the role, Murray had to spend months in Italy for the
shoot, away from his family. “For me, that was a big part of the journey—I was like this
lonely sailor at sea,” he notes, “and it fit with the mood of the story.”
Murray felt there was no way to play Steve Zissou but as honestly as possible,
flaws forward. “Steve is obviously deeply flawed, a guy driven by his desires, continually
blind to people around him, almost infantile in a sense,” he says. “But more than that,
Steve is someone who doesn’t put on a mask to disguise who he is. He simply lets fly.
And you come to realize that there is also something else about him that allows him to be
leading this odyssey, to have held this crew together in the middle of chaos. He has a real
strong feeling of mission, and kind of childish sense of wonder that has never gone away.
At the same time, he’s also the most vulnerable guy in the world, because he’s driven by
these feelings that he’s incapable of really expressing to anyone.”
Murray continues, “Right now, as the film begins, Steve is in the darkest hours
before the dawn. He’s sort of sliding off the continental shelf, into the depths.
Unfortunately, he’s never been very good at self-examination, so it’s really unknown
territory.”
Riding Zissou’s wild emotional waves was a large part of Murray’s challenge.
“He has major mood swings—sometimes within a single paragraph,” the actor observes.
“He goes this way and then that way and the idea was that these emotions come up in him
for fleeting moments but he just keeps barreling along. He makes a fool of himself all the
time, but he doesn’t stop and react to it. The beauty of Steve Zissou is that he doesn’t
ever lose his momentum.”
“For me, this was a very different kind of performance,” summarizes Murray,
“because you’re not stopping and selling every moment as you would in an ordinary
comedy. It’s more about showing up in the moment. Zissou is like a guy who’s fighting
the waves, and yet, no matter what, he keeps going full speed ahead. He knows he’s
going to get knocked around, that it’s going to be tough, but he’s convinced he’s going to
get somewhere.”
Another unique aspect of playing Steve Zissou was exploring a most unusual
father-son relationship with Owen Wilson, playing Ned Plimpton, who may — or may
not — be Steve’s son. For Murray, a key turning point in their relationship comes when
Steve brings Ned to the beach in his pajamas to witness a multi-chromatic flood of
electric jellyfish. “That’s the moment when Steve sees something in Ned,” he points out.
“When Ned sees the jellyfish, he starts to realize that maybe there’s more to this guy than
he ever imagined, and of course, there turns out to be much more than almost anyone
could imagine. What he and Steve hope is going to be an amazing adventure also turns
out to be an emotional adventure for them.”
Yet Murray believes that Zissou does have a family, even before Ned shows up, if
an alternative one, in the rough-and-tumble crew of misfits he has gathered around him.
On the set, Murray found that this makeshift family gelled for him in unexpected ways.
“One of the things that was so beautiful about this film is all the love that went into it,
from Wes, and also from all the actors on the boat,” he says. “I think the audience will
also really feel it because when this group was together, when the team was all together
working, the connection was so…I don’t want to say warm because it’s different than
that. There was something like a heat, a connection that was like blood between us,
almost.”
Ned Plimpton (AKA Kingsley Zissou)
Owen Wilson, a regular collaborator with Wes Anderson, makes a distinct
departure in THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou with the role of Ned, an earnest
Southern gentleman and member of The Zissou Society who has reason to believe he
might—or might not—be Steve Zissou’s son. As he embarks on the adventure of a
lifetime with Zissou, he also finds that he and his would-be father are falling for the same
beautiful, yet pregnant, reporter.
Unlike most of the characters Owen Wilson has played, Ned lacks all manner of
hipness or worldliness and exists in a kind of genteel, naive world of his making. To
prepare for the role, Wilson rehearsed his scenes, without any of the other actors, alone
with his long-lived friend Anderson. “Owen came to visit me in Rome a couple of
months before filming started, and we would rehearse the scenes on the roof of the Hotel
Eden,” recalls Anderson. “During that period, we also developed his accent and a strong
idea of who this character Ned is and where he’s coming from.”
The extracurricular work paid off for Anderson. “Ultimately, I feel Owen ended
up doing something quite different from anything I’ve seen him do before,” says the
director. “He has developed such a strong persona in his movies, but this role is quite a
departure from that person and I was very, very happy with his work.”
Like Ned, Owen Wilson can remember being fascinated by documentaries about
exploration as a kid, which helped inspire his characterization of Ned. “I think every kid
wants to be an explorer off on an expedition at some point,” he comments. “There’s kind
of a romantic notion to that. And since Ned has been watching Steve Zissou ever since he
was a kid, and dreaming about his wild life, when he finally meets him, he’s very much
in awe of him. It’s not something that is going to be taken away from him easily.”
Another key to the character for Owen Wilson was to immerse himself in a kind
of old-fashioned, nearly mythical gentility. “I wanted to be the kind of Southerner who
comes out of that courtly tradition, who is more than polite and is really a genuinely good
person,” he says. “The accent we developed is sort of like I imagine people in the Civil
War talking, you know, almost ‘Gone With the Wind.’ It’s not meant to be Meryl Streep
doing a pitch-perfect accent, but it’s meant to be right for the character in a different way.
It all fits into the world of the film, which is slightly artificial, almost surreal, while the
emotions and feelings are very real.”
Jane Winslett Richardson
Entering the scene like a Madonna on an island beach is Cate Blanchett playing
the pregnant journalist, Jane. In one of those rare life-following-fiction moments, Wes
Anderson had decided to cast Cate Blanchett well before the actress herself became
pregnant. The production had gone so far as to develop a prosthetic belly for Blanchett
when kismet struck.
“When we found out Cate was really pregnant, at first we worried that she wouldn’t be
able to do the film anymore, because of all the traveling and difficult work involving
boats and cold weather and other hardships,” recalls Barry Mendel. “But she remained
totally gung ho and became even more excited, saying it would only help her play the
part.”
“It was a complete coincidence,” explains Blanchett, “and yet it was so lovely, it
sort of seemed fated.”
Blanchett was initially drawn to THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou because
of Wes Anderson’s original perspective on adventure comedy. “I loved Wes’s view of an
action film, which is sort of a mixture of being very tongue-in-cheek while taking it all
very seriously. He brings a very sophisticated humor to the story, and yet there’s a
melancholy at the core of all these funny situations,” she notes. “Wes has such enormous
compassion towards all his characters, and he excavates them in a way that they all kind
of have a moment where you see inside them. I think he manages to make them really
live and breathe by creating this very unusual and particular universe around them,
which, even though it’s very odd and funny, is somehow also very real.”
Later, Blanchett became more entranced by her character and the predicament she finds
herself in: trapped at sea while trying to figure out her future. “The thing I like most
about Jane is that she is a very blunt and direct person, but right now, she is going
through these hormonal lows and highs that make her far more sensitive than she
normally would be,” says the actress. “I also like that she enters this trip not even
knowing whether or not she wants to be pregnant but then some very magical and
wonderful things happen on board that change everything for her.”
Also enjoyable for Blanchett was being fought over by Owen Wilson and Bill
Murray in their roles as Ned and Steve Zissou. “Ned is unlike anyone Jane has ever
known. She’s coming out of this sort of corrupt relationship, and here’s this man who
seems almost impossibly innocent,” she observes. “Meanwhile, she finds Steve’s
arrogance, insensitivity and his desperation quite repugnant. He was her childhood
hero—The Great Zissou—but now she sort of wishes she hadn’t met him because
something, some ideal picture, has been robbed from her.”
She continues, “Owen really captured the heartwarming innocence in Ned, which
I think is very hard for a modern man to embrace but he’s done it. Bill, of course, is
hilarious— everyone expects that—but he’s also a heartbreaker, and you really see that
quality as well in this role.”
For Wes Anderson, Blanchett and Murray made for an intriguing pair. “Cate is
someone who made Bill even better because she challenged him to be more prepared, and
Bill brought something to Cate by challenging her to be even more in the moment. There
is something very kinetic that happened between the two of them in these roles,” he says.
Eleanor Zissou
The role of Steve Zissou’s aristocratic wife, Eleanor, belongs to Academy
Award® winner Anjelica Huston. “I wrote this part for her because there’s nobody better
to have on a set than Anjelica,” comments Wes Anderson. “She brings the perfect attitude
in that she’s very excited about everything yet she also can’t be perturbed. She’s totally
cool. She’s also a very smart woman and a truly beautiful person, and there’s something
that just emanates from her that is entirely unique and right for Eleanor Zissou. In a
sense, she holds the movie together.”
Having starred as a very different matriarchal figure in “The Royal Tenenbaums,”
Huston had a chance here to switch gears. “It was wonderful to see Anjelica play such a
different kind of woman with Eleanor, who is such an independent spirit, not really tied
to anyone or any thing,” says producer Mendel. “She captures Eleanor’s freedom, and I
love the way she looks in the movie, and her heroics at the end.”
Huston was thrilled to be part of a true adventure film. “I love adventures and I
love the sea,” she says—and especially one that emerged from the mind of Wes
Anderson. “The film really is an action-adventure movie, which might not be something
you would have thought Wes could make, but I think he really disproved that from the
first day on the set,” she says. “Part of what made it so fun is that it was a really liberating
film for Wes.”
Huston also perceives THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou as an offbeat love
story about people who don’t connect in obvious ways. “To me, what attracts Eleanor to
Steve is that he’s such a loose cannon, which, ironically, is also one of the things that has
led to problems in their relationship,” she explains. “Whether or not they are suited for
one another, the reality is that Eleanor’s heart belongs to Steve.” Huston also enjoyed
working with Bill Murray in the unexpected role of an adventure hero. “Obviously, Bill
has an amazing sense of humor, but I also discovered that he can be very intrepid in his
own way,” she says.
Helping Huston to create her inimitable character was two-time Oscar® winner
and multiple Academy Award® nominee costume designer Milena Canonero, who came
up with Eleanor’s offbeat elegant outfits and the blue streaks that run through her long,
black hair. “The look Milena created really ties into this idea that Eleanor is a bit of a
self-made mermaid,” observes Huston. “Eleanor reveals part of what I love about Wes’s
characters: they always kind of bridge fantasy and reality, which makes them very
unpredictable.”
Klaus Daimler
In the role of Steve Zissou’s loyal-to-a-fault engineer, Willem Dafoe takes a rare
comic turn, creating a character driven by a ceaseless desire to please and a Freudian
jealousy streak. Dafoe was drawn to the unexpected part on the basis of the film’s script,
which he found defied categorization.
“I found it very funny, but there’s also a darkness to it, a poignancy,” he says.
“It’s not just a comic adventure, because Wes always brings with him a dark shadow and
a certain weight that comes out of his own life experience. He creates a very specific
world out of fantasies, desires, frustrations and all the things that interest him, and that
world is so complete that it can have its own rules. His form of comedy isn’t glib or safe.
It’s very sophisticated—and he also brought together a cast that has the capacity to
understand this vision.”
Dafoe was also intrigued by his character and, especially, the relationship
between Klaus, who has been serving with Steve Zissou for decades, and Ned, who
comes along out of the blue and wins Zissou’s affection. “It’s about sibling rivalry, but
what puts a unique spin on it is that you’ve got these two very unlikely siblings,” he
notes. “They’re siblings by circumstance, and sometimes it seems that it’s circumstance
that makes us who we are.”
As for Klaus himself, Dafoe thinks the character’s appeal may lie not so much in
his outrageousness as in the part of him we all recognize. “For me, the fun part about
Klaus is that he’s a guy who pretends to be capable, yet he doesn’t have a clue, and I
think there’s something rather charming about that kind of personality—’cause we all
have a little of him in us,” he summarizes.
Ironically, Wes Anderson originally thought he would cast a bona fide European
in the role, prior to meeting Willem Dafoe and deciding he was right for the part.
“Willem came into this supporting role and, basically, stole the show,” says Anderson.
Barry Mendel adds, “To have this great dramatic actor who has starred in films
like ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ and ‘Platoon’ give such a wonderful comedic
performance was really thrilling for us. I certainly don’t think anyone has seen Willem
give a performance this funny before, and I’m excited that people will have a chance to
enjoy him doing a completely different kind of thing.”
Alistair Hennessey
Outside of the jaguar shark that took the life of his beloved partner Esteban, Steve
Zissou has only one true nemesis in life: Alistair Hennessey, an oceanographer who is
better-funded, has a bigger boat and is quickly eclipsing Zissou’s star. To make matters
worse, Hennessey was formerly married to Eleanor Zissou, creating a complicated
triangle of jealousies. For Wes Anderson, Jeff Goldblum had the perfect combination of
“eccentricity and brilliance” to play the semi-villainous Hennessey. “He’s an actor who is
very devoted and always has a lot of ideas,” notes Anderson. “I think he brings a
wonderful amount of punch to the film.”
“I see Hennessey as someone who is very passionate about the ocean, loves the
science of it, and has made himself into a huge success,” says Goldblum. “He enjoys the
adventure, but he’s not such a rough and tough guy, and he’d rather have fancy living
quarters and the very finest of equipment. I think you could probably say he unhealthily
identifies himself with all of his material stuff, so when everything he has is stolen from
him, it’s a huge loss.”
While Steve Zissou might feel threatened by Alistair Hennessey, Goldblum
believes Hennessey doesn’t really mind having Zissou around. “You know when
everything is said and done, Zissou is a lovable guy, and I don’t think Hennessey feels
competitive with him. I think Hennessey’s doing so well, that’s not really an issue for
him. He’s rooting for Zissou, really, rooting for his relationship with Eleanor as well,”
says Goldblum. “It might sound strange, but these are sophisticated and complex
relationships.”
For Goldblum, the relationships form the heart of the film. “There’s a lot of loss
in this movie, really,” Goldblum observes. “It starts with Steve’s friend Esteban dying,
and along the way, people lose their careers, their stuff, their sense of self. But in the end,
we all find ourselves huddled together in this little bubble deep in the ocean, in these
uncharted seas, and in the depths of ourselves, perhaps. That’s a magical moment.”
Bill Ubell
The one true outsider on The Belafonte is Bill Ubell, the so-called bond company
“stooge,” who is given the impossible job of making sure Steve Zissou doesn’t go over
budget. Yet, when push comes to shove, Bill is ready to put his life on the line for the
team.
To play this comical hero, Wes Anderson cast an actor who has long been an
audience favorite: Bud Cort, who first came to notice in the influential classic comedy
“Harold and Maude” and has gone on to a diverse career. “It was great fun having Bud on
this movie, because he is a total character. He’s a great actor and completely original, and
he threw himself into the role of the bond company stooge with every last bit of drama he
could muster,”
says Anderson.
Cort enjoyed the chance to show the evolution of a most unusual character, the
type not usually seen triumphing in adventure films. “Bill is an uptight, anal, hardworking
guy who unwittingly has a blast on The Belafonte,” explains Cort. “When he is
waylaid and kidnapped, it becomes this incredible adventure for him. He starts to really
loosen up. The tie comes a little undone, the shirt opens and he even calms down a little
bit.”
Throwing himself into the role, Cort even spent weeks learning the Tagalog
language so he could converse with the Filipino actors kidnapping him. “It’s a beautiful
tongue,” he notes. “It involves using muscles in your mouth and throat that you would
never think of using.”
Along the way, working with Wes Anderson reminded Cort of another director
from earlier in his career. “He reminds me of Hal Ashby,” Cort says. “He’s one of those
filmmakers who is taking film into new territory, and thank God for that. Wes is really on
his own planet, yet he’s absolutely fastidious and totally in command.”
Another thrill for Cort was the chance to work on screen with Bill Murray, who
he had worked with years before in a workshop in Chicago’s Second City. “The minute I
read the script for THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou, I knew this was going to be a
huge role for Bill,” he says. “It was the perfect wedding between script and actor. It felt
heaven-sent for him, for me, and for all of us in the cast. The story is so loaded with
human drama, spiritual drama, environmental drama. It’s a deep story, really, deep like
the ocean, and it’s been as amazing an adventure making the movie as the one Team
Zissou goes on.” At the heart of any Wes Anderson movie are the characters and—even
with the emphasis on fast-moving adventure and comedy in THE LIFE AQUATIC—the
characters remain the engine that drives the film. Starting with Steve Zissou—who wears
his own oversized ego like a crown yet faces moments where he pleads to his crew,
“Don’t you guys like me anymore?”—and continuing down through his entire ragtag
crew and assorted enemies, each person has his or her own human complexities that
emerge when the going gets tough. The characters include:
Steve Zissou
From the very start of writing THE LIFE AQUATIC, Wes Anderson knew that
Academy Award® nominee Bill Murray would be Steve Zissou. “Not only is Bill one of
my favorite actors, but I know from experience he is someone who allows you to do
things differently,” explains Anderson. “He’s somebody who has the advantage of being
totally uninhibited and at the same time can get everybody around him caught up in his
mood. I knew it would be really interesting to see Bill throw himself into playing
somebody who is not only energetic and funny but also tormented, angry and very
agitated.”
Producer Barry Mendel adds, “Having worked with Bill in ‘Rushmore’ and ‘The
Royal Tenenbaums,’ I think it was always Wes’s hope to write a movie for Bill that
would really showcase a lot of what he believes Bill can do—and I think they both
became very excited about the role of Steve Zissou for exactly that reason. Bill has
always had a natural affinity for Wes’s dialogue, but here he gives such a naturalistic and
honest performance that he provides the audience with the illusion that it comes easily.”
Coming off the acclaim and Best Actor Oscar® nomination he received for “Lost
in Translation,” Murray was drawn in by taking on a very different kind of leading role
than anything he had ever done—a literal “man of action,” a bold adventurer, filmmaker
and hero, albeit one forced to come face-to-face with his own growing powerlessness. In
playing Steve Zissou, Murray knew he would have to approach an oceanic force of a
man—with emotions that swing from the ecstatically funny to the profoundly sad, but
also linger in the vast zone in between. Murray was further intrigued by the screenplay’s
wide-ranging ambitions.
“This thing really screams,” sums up Murray about the screenplay. “There’s just
an enormous amount of material in THE LIFE AQUATIC—dialogue, action, visuals,
humor and emotion that all come at you in quick bursts. It’s also the biggest movie I’ve
ever done in terms of production scope, much bigger than ‘Ghostbusters,’ even. And it
really creates its own view of a world at sea.”
Adding to the comedy-inflected pathos of Murray’s performance as Steve Zissou
was the fact that in order to play the role, Murray had to spend months in Italy for the
shoot, away from his family. “For me, that was a big part of the journey—I was like this
lonely sailor at sea,” he notes, “and it fit with the mood of the story.”
Murray felt there was no way to play Steve Zissou but as honestly as possible,
flaws forward. “Steve is obviously deeply flawed, a guy driven by his desires, continually
blind to people around him, almost infantile in a sense,” he says. “But more than that,
Steve is someone who doesn’t put on a mask to disguise who he is. He simply lets fly.
And you come to realize that there is also something else about him that allows him to be
leading this odyssey, to have held this crew together in the middle of chaos. He has a real
strong feeling of mission, and kind of childish sense of wonder that has never gone away.
At the same time, he’s also the most vulnerable guy in the world, because he’s driven by
these feelings that he’s incapable of really expressing to anyone.”
Murray continues, “Right now, as the film begins, Steve is in the darkest hours
before the dawn. He’s sort of sliding off the continental shelf, into the depths.
Unfortunately, he’s never been very good at self-examination, so it’s really unknown
territory.”
Riding Zissou’s wild emotional waves was a large part of Murray’s challenge.
“He has major mood swings—sometimes within a single paragraph,” the actor observes.
“He goes this way and then that way and the idea was that these emotions come up in him
for fleeting moments but he just keeps barreling along. He makes a fool of himself all the
time, but he doesn’t stop and react to it. The beauty of Steve Zissou is that he doesn’t
ever lose his momentum.”
“For me, this was a very different kind of performance,” summarizes Murray,
“because you’re not stopping and selling every moment as you would in an ordinary
comedy. It’s more about showing up in the moment. Zissou is like a guy who’s fighting
the waves, and yet, no matter what, he keeps going full speed ahead. He knows he’s
going to get knocked around, that it’s going to be tough, but he’s convinced he’s going to
get somewhere.”
Another unique aspect of playing Steve Zissou was exploring a most unusual
father-son relationship with Owen Wilson, playing Ned Plimpton, who may — or may
not — be Steve’s son. For Murray, a key turning point in their relationship comes when
Steve brings Ned to the beach in his pajamas to witness a multi-chromatic flood of
electric jellyfish. “That’s the moment when Steve sees something in Ned,” he points out.
“When Ned sees the jellyfish, he starts to realize that maybe there’s more to this guy than
he ever imagined, and of course, there turns out to be much more than almost anyone
could imagine. What he and Steve hope is going to be an amazing adventure also turns
out to be an emotional adventure for them.”
Yet Murray believes that Zissou does have a family, even before Ned shows up, if
an alternative one, in the rough-and-tumble crew of misfits he has gathered around him.
On the set, Murray found that this makeshift family gelled for him in unexpected ways.
“One of the things that was so beautiful about this film is all the love that went into it,
from Wes, and also from all the actors on the boat,” he says. “I think the audience will
also really feel it because when this group was together, when the team was all together
working, the connection was so…I don’t want to say warm because it’s different than
that. There was something like a heat, a connection that was like blood between us,
almost.”
Ned Plimpton (AKA Kingsley Zissou)
Owen Wilson, a regular collaborator with Wes Anderson, makes a distinct
departure in THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou with the role of Ned, an earnest
Southern gentleman and member of The Zissou Society who has reason to believe he
might—or might not—be Steve Zissou’s son. As he embarks on the adventure of a
lifetime with Zissou, he also finds that he and his would-be father are falling for the same
beautiful, yet pregnant, reporter.
Unlike most of the characters Owen Wilson has played, Ned lacks all manner of
hipness or worldliness and exists in a kind of genteel, naive world of his making. To
prepare for the role, Wilson rehearsed his scenes, without any of the other actors, alone
with his long-lived friend Anderson. “Owen came to visit me in Rome a couple of
months before filming started, and we would rehearse the scenes on the roof of the Hotel
Eden,” recalls Anderson. “During that period, we also developed his accent and a strong
idea of who this character Ned is and where he’s coming from.”
The extracurricular work paid off for Anderson. “Ultimately, I feel Owen ended
up doing something quite different from anything I’ve seen him do before,” says the
director. “He has developed such a strong persona in his movies, but this role is quite a
departure from that person and I was very, very happy with his work.”
Like Ned, Owen Wilson can remember being fascinated by documentaries about
exploration as a kid, which helped inspire his characterization of Ned. “I think every kid
wants to be an explorer off on an expedition at some point,” he comments. “There’s kind
of a romantic notion to that. And since Ned has been watching Steve Zissou ever since he
was a kid, and dreaming about his wild life, when he finally meets him, he’s very much
in awe of him. It’s not something that is going to be taken away from him easily.”
Another key to the character for Owen Wilson was to immerse himself in a kind
of old-fashioned, nearly mythical gentility. “I wanted to be the kind of Southerner who
comes out of that courtly tradition, who is more than polite and is really a genuinely good
person,” he says. “The accent we developed is sort of like I imagine people in the Civil
War talking, you know, almost ‘Gone With the Wind.’ It’s not meant to be Meryl Streep
doing a pitch-perfect accent, but it’s meant to be right for the character in a different way.
It all fits into the world of the film, which is slightly artificial, almost surreal, while the
emotions and feelings are very real.”
Jane Winslett Richardson
Entering the scene like a Madonna on an island beach is Cate Blanchett playing
the pregnant journalist, Jane. In one of those rare life-following-fiction moments, Wes
Anderson had decided to cast Cate Blanchett well before the actress herself became
pregnant. The production had gone so far as to develop a prosthetic belly for Blanchett
when kismet struck.
“When we found out Cate was really pregnant, at first we worried that she wouldn’t be
able to do the film anymore, because of all the traveling and difficult work involving
boats and cold weather and other hardships,” recalls Barry Mendel. “But she remained
totally gung ho and became even more excited, saying it would only help her play the
part.”
“It was a complete coincidence,” explains Blanchett, “and yet it was so lovely, it
sort of seemed fated.”
Blanchett was initially drawn to THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou because
of Wes Anderson’s original perspective on adventure comedy. “I loved Wes’s view of an
action film, which is sort of a mixture of being very tongue-in-cheek while taking it all
very seriously. He brings a very sophisticated humor to the story, and yet there’s a
melancholy at the core of all these funny situations,” she notes. “Wes has such enormous
compassion towards all his characters, and he excavates them in a way that they all kind
of have a moment where you see inside them. I think he manages to make them really
live and breathe by creating this very unusual and particular universe around them,
which, even though it’s very odd and funny, is somehow also very real.”
Later, Blanchett became more entranced by her character and the predicament she finds
herself in: trapped at sea while trying to figure out her future. “The thing I like most
about Jane is that she is a very blunt and direct person, but right now, she is going
through these hormonal lows and highs that make her far more sensitive than she
normally would be,” says the actress. “I also like that she enters this trip not even
knowing whether or not she wants to be pregnant but then some very magical and
wonderful things happen on board that change everything for her.”
Also enjoyable for Blanchett was being fought over by Owen Wilson and Bill
Murray in their roles as Ned and Steve Zissou. “Ned is unlike anyone Jane has ever
known. She’s coming out of this sort of corrupt relationship, and here’s this man who
seems almost impossibly innocent,” she observes. “Meanwhile, she finds Steve’s
arrogance, insensitivity and his desperation quite repugnant. He was her childhood
hero—The Great Zissou—but now she sort of wishes she hadn’t met him because
something, some ideal picture, has been robbed from her.”
She continues, “Owen really captured the heartwarming innocence in Ned, which
I think is very hard for a modern man to embrace but he’s done it. Bill, of course, is
hilarious— everyone expects that—but he’s also a heartbreaker, and you really see that
quality as well in this role.”
For Wes Anderson, Blanchett and Murray made for an intriguing pair. “Cate is
someone who made Bill even better because she challenged him to be more prepared, and
Bill brought something to Cate by challenging her to be even more in the moment. There
is something very kinetic that happened between the two of them in these roles,” he says.
Eleanor Zissou
The role of Steve Zissou’s aristocratic wife, Eleanor, belongs to Academy
Award® winner Anjelica Huston. “I wrote this part for her because there’s nobody better
to have on a set than Anjelica,” comments Wes Anderson. “She brings the perfect attitude
in that she’s very excited about everything yet she also can’t be perturbed. She’s totally
cool. She’s also a very smart woman and a truly beautiful person, and there’s something
that just emanates from her that is entirely unique and right for Eleanor Zissou. In a
sense, she holds the movie together.”
Having starred as a very different matriarchal figure in “The Royal Tenenbaums,”
Huston had a chance here to switch gears. “It was wonderful to see Anjelica play such a
different kind of woman with Eleanor, who is such an independent spirit, not really tied
to anyone or any thing,” says producer Mendel. “She captures Eleanor’s freedom, and I
love the way she looks in the movie, and her heroics at the end.”
Huston was thrilled to be part of a true adventure film. “I love adventures and I
love the sea,” she says—and especially one that emerged from the mind of Wes
Anderson. “The film really is an action-adventure movie, which might not be something
you would have thought Wes could make, but I think he really disproved that from the
first day on the set,” she says. “Part of what made it so fun is that it was a really liberating
film for Wes.”
Huston also perceives THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou as an offbeat love
story about people who don’t connect in obvious ways. “To me, what attracts Eleanor to
Steve is that he’s such a loose cannon, which, ironically, is also one of the things that has
led to problems in their relationship,” she explains. “Whether or not they are suited for
one another, the reality is that Eleanor’s heart belongs to Steve.” Huston also enjoyed
working with Bill Murray in the unexpected role of an adventure hero. “Obviously, Bill
has an amazing sense of humor, but I also discovered that he can be very intrepid in his
own way,” she says.
Helping Huston to create her inimitable character was two-time Oscar® winner
and multiple Academy Award® nominee costume designer Milena Canonero, who came
up with Eleanor’s offbeat elegant outfits and the blue streaks that run through her long,
black hair. “The look Milena created really ties into this idea that Eleanor is a bit of a
self-made mermaid,” observes Huston. “Eleanor reveals part of what I love about Wes’s
characters: they always kind of bridge fantasy and reality, which makes them very
unpredictable.”
Klaus Daimler
In the role of Steve Zissou’s loyal-to-a-fault engineer, Willem Dafoe takes a rare
comic turn, creating a character driven by a ceaseless desire to please and a Freudian
jealousy streak. Dafoe was drawn to the unexpected part on the basis of the film’s script,
which he found defied categorization.
“I found it very funny, but there’s also a darkness to it, a poignancy,” he says.
“It’s not just a comic adventure, because Wes always brings with him a dark shadow and
a certain weight that comes out of his own life experience. He creates a very specific
world out of fantasies, desires, frustrations and all the things that interest him, and that
world is so complete that it can have its own rules. His form of comedy isn’t glib or safe.
It’s very sophisticated—and he also brought together a cast that has the capacity to
understand this vision.”
Dafoe was also intrigued by his character and, especially, the relationship
between Klaus, who has been serving with Steve Zissou for decades, and Ned, who
comes along out of the blue and wins Zissou’s affection. “It’s about sibling rivalry, but
what puts a unique spin on it is that you’ve got these two very unlikely siblings,” he
notes. “They’re siblings by circumstance, and sometimes it seems that it’s circumstance
that makes us who we are.”
As for Klaus himself, Dafoe thinks the character’s appeal may lie not so much in
his outrageousness as in the part of him we all recognize. “For me, the fun part about
Klaus is that he’s a guy who pretends to be capable, yet he doesn’t have a clue, and I
think there’s something rather charming about that kind of personality—’cause we all
have a little of him in us,” he summarizes.
Ironically, Wes Anderson originally thought he would cast a bona fide European
in the role, prior to meeting Willem Dafoe and deciding he was right for the part.
“Willem came into this supporting role and, basically, stole the show,” says Anderson.
Barry Mendel adds, “To have this great dramatic actor who has starred in films
like ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ and ‘Platoon’ give such a wonderful comedic
performance was really thrilling for us. I certainly don’t think anyone has seen Willem
give a performance this funny before, and I’m excited that people will have a chance to
enjoy him doing a completely different kind of thing.”
Alistair Hennessey
Outside of the jaguar shark that took the life of his beloved partner Esteban, Steve
Zissou has only one true nemesis in life: Alistair Hennessey, an oceanographer who is
better-funded, has a bigger boat and is quickly eclipsing Zissou’s star. To make matters
worse, Hennessey was formerly married to Eleanor Zissou, creating a complicated
triangle of jealousies. For Wes Anderson, Jeff Goldblum had the perfect combination of
“eccentricity and brilliance” to play the semi-villainous Hennessey. “He’s an actor who is
very devoted and always has a lot of ideas,” notes Anderson. “I think he brings a
wonderful amount of punch to the film.”
“I see Hennessey as someone who is very passionate about the ocean, loves the
science of it, and has made himself into a huge success,” says Goldblum. “He enjoys the
adventure, but he’s not such a rough and tough guy, and he’d rather have fancy living
quarters and the very finest of equipment. I think you could probably say he unhealthily
identifies himself with all of his material stuff, so when everything he has is stolen from
him, it’s a huge loss.”
While Steve Zissou might feel threatened by Alistair Hennessey, Goldblum
believes Hennessey doesn’t really mind having Zissou around. “You know when
everything is said and done, Zissou is a lovable guy, and I don’t think Hennessey feels
competitive with him. I think Hennessey’s doing so well, that’s not really an issue for
him. He’s rooting for Zissou, really, rooting for his relationship with Eleanor as well,”
says Goldblum. “It might sound strange, but these are sophisticated and complex
relationships.”
For Goldblum, the relationships form the heart of the film. “There’s a lot of loss
in this movie, really,” Goldblum observes. “It starts with Steve’s friend Esteban dying,
and along the way, people lose their careers, their stuff, their sense of self. But in the end,
we all find ourselves huddled together in this little bubble deep in the ocean, in these
uncharted seas, and in the depths of ourselves, perhaps. That’s a magical moment.”
Bill Ubell
The one true outsider on The Belafonte is Bill Ubell, the so-called bond company
“stooge,” who is given the impossible job of making sure Steve Zissou doesn’t go over
budget. Yet, when push comes to shove, Bill is ready to put his life on the line for the
team.
To play this comical hero, Wes Anderson cast an actor who has long been an
audience favorite: Bud Cort, who first came to notice in the influential classic comedy
“Harold and Maude” and has gone on to a diverse career. “It was great fun having Bud on
this movie, because he is a total character. He’s a great actor and completely original, and
he threw himself into the role of the bond company stooge with every last bit of drama he
could muster,”
says Anderson.
Cort enjoyed the chance to show the evolution of a most unusual character, the
type not usually seen triumphing in adventure films. “Bill is an uptight, anal, hardworking
guy who unwittingly has a blast on The Belafonte,” explains Cort. “When he is
waylaid and kidnapped, it becomes this incredible adventure for him. He starts to really
loosen up. The tie comes a little undone, the shirt opens and he even calms down a little
bit.”
Throwing himself into the role, Cort even spent weeks learning the Tagalog
language so he could converse with the Filipino actors kidnapping him. “It’s a beautiful
tongue,” he notes. “It involves using muscles in your mouth and throat that you would
never think of using.”
Along the way, working with Wes Anderson reminded Cort of another director
from earlier in his career. “He reminds me of Hal Ashby,” Cort says. “He’s one of those
filmmakers who is taking film into new territory, and thank God for that. Wes is really on
his own planet, yet he’s absolutely fastidious and totally in command.”
Another thrill for Cort was the chance to work on screen with Bill Murray, who
he had worked with years before in a workshop in Chicago’s Second City. “The minute I
read the script for THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou, I knew this was going to be a
huge role for Bill,” he says. “It was the perfect wedding between script and actor. It felt
heaven-sent for him, for me, and for all of us in the cast. The story is so loaded with
human drama, spiritual drama, environmental drama. It’s a deep story, really, deep like
the ocean, and it’s been as amazing an adventure making the movie as the one Team
Zissou goes on.”
A TOUR OF THE BELAFOTE
“Let me tell you about my boat . . .”
— Steve Zissou
In Wes Anderson’s and Noah Baumbach’s screenplay for THE LIFE AQUATIC
with Steve Zissou, Steve Zissou’s boat, The Belafonte, becomes essentially another
character in the film. From its colorful laboratory and decked-out kitchen to its research
library, editing room and dreamlike “observation bubble,” the boat seems to reflect the
offbeat spirit of the entire journey.
The production began by searching for a ship with a unique shape and style. “It
was almost like casting,” says production designer Mark Friedberg. “The search for the
boat itself was quite a ride. Wes was very particular about what type of boat he wanted—
that it needed to be of World War II vintage, that it needed to be a minesweeper, that it
had to be about 50 meters and, to some degree, that it would be reminiscent of Cousteau’s
Calypso.”
After months of scouring the seas, the production turned up a 50-year-old
minesweeper in South Africa, which they limped from Capetown to Rome for the
production. That ship was kept intact for many of the outdoor sequences but re-outfitted
to become a oceanographic research ship, complete with towers, an observation deck and
brightly colored paint. Meanwhile, a second, similar ship was purchased in order to be
dismantled for set dressing.
“When it came to the interior of the boat, we wanted it to reflect Zissou, a man
unsure of where he is going in life right now, so everything in this world is sort of jerryrigged,
pieced together,” says Friedberg. “As we began, the question was, is this story
about a real man facing his son or is it a fable or is it a tongue-in-cheek comedy—and the
answer was that it’s all of these, and that had to be reflected in the design. We wanted an
intimacy but also a breadth.”
From the beginning, Anderson knew that he wanted audiences to see The
Belafonte for the first time in a kind of cross-sectional, model view, cut open to reveal the
entire inner workings. So the design team built a half-boat lengthwise so that the camera
and crew could move in a linear line from room to room.
“Being as the actual ship is made of aluminum, we couldn’t easily move walls, so
we pretty much rebuilt what we saw inside the boat on a stage,” explains Friedberg. “Wes
wanted to be able to shoot the entire boat just by moving a crane around the room for that
first scene that introduces the boat. He wanted to use only practical sets and very little in
the way of digital compositing or effects. There’s a great comic sense and fluidity to it,
and Wes had it all planned out very precisely.”
“Shooting that scene was a lot of fun,” says Anderson. “We had all the actors kind
of walking around in this ant colony and the lights are changing and the cameras moving,
and it was really exciting because none of us had ever done anything like this before. The
set itself was more like a museum piece than a movie set—people kept coming by to see
it.”
That half-Belafonte set—some three stories tall—was built, like most of the sets,
on the backlot at Italy’s legendary Cinecitta Studios, with its famed craftsmen and
artisans. “We chose Italy because it had everything we were looking for—it’s on the
water, it has Cinecitta where all the Fellini films were made, and it’s the Mediterranean,
so it has some of that island sensibility,” says Friedberg.

Adds Barry Mendel: “There’s a very specific flavor to shooting Italy, and I think some of that European sensibility of handmade craftsmanship has really become a part of the unique fabric of the film.” The sets were one thing, but the actual boat used as The Belafonte took a lot of getting used to for cast and crew. For many, their introduction came on a day trip during which Wes Anderson hoped to shoot some of Team Zissou’s documentary footage. “We set out for this little volcanic island, and it was very rough seas and nearly everybody got seasick—and yet we had an amazing time,” he recalls. “We all got to know each other, and when you’re on a boat like that, it becomes a very intimate thing. There’s no more barriers. And what’s interesting is that people become very emotional about The Belafonte, very loyal to it.” The production designer also created Steve Zissou’s Pescespada Island compound in Italy, replete with a 12th-century castle, a pool with a killer whale (the whale is added through rear projection), a seaplane landing pad, and an all-important Ping-Pong table. “The theme for Zissou’s compound was that there should be an I-won’t-grow-up quality to it,” notes Friedberg. “Pescespada Island was an extraordinary set, pretty much unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” sums up Mendel. Meanwhile, contrasting with The Belafonte is Steve Zissou’s arch rival Hennessey’s ship, forged as one of the most up-to-date survey ships in the world, on which no expense has been spared. For this ship, the production used a NATO research ship—The Elite—which proved to be The Belafonte’s antithesis. “It was so much the opposite of what we created for Steve Zissou—ultra-clean, very structured and very high-tech,” notes Mark Friedberg. “It’s a whole different world.”

Another key part of The Belafonte is the Deep Search submersible—previously named after one of Steve Zissou’s old flames—in which the team ultimately journeys deep into the sea in search of the jaguar shark. The mini-sub was built by an Italian crew out of steel and fiberglass, with working propellers and lights. “The submarine was a really crazy scene to shoot because we had the entire cast, except for Owen, all sealed in the back of this very tiny set. It was designed so that they essentially bolted in and couldn’t get out, which really set the mood for the scene,” says Anderson. “There was the scary feeling of going into theunknown.”

THE UDERSEA WORLD OF STEVE ZISSOU “How are things going with your—what are you calling it? Leopard fish?”

— Hennessey
Though THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou is an underwater adventure, the underwater world it creates is unlike any others that audiences have seen before. That’sbecause the aquatic realm visited by Team Zissou sprang not so much from real oceanography and biology as from the imaginations of Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach and animator Henry Selick. Teeming with glowing, multicolored creatures out of a dream—from candy-colored Sugar Crabs to the star-encrusted Constellation Ray and from the two-inch Crayon Pony Fish to the 80-foot spotted behemoth known as the Jaguar Shark—the oceanic home of Steve Zissou is amply filled with the magic and awe he finds has gone missing from the rest of his life.

As soon as Anderson and Baumbach began writing about imaginary sea creatures in their screenplay, Anderson’s thoughts turned to how he was going to bring these storybook animals to life. That’s when he decided to contact Henry Selick, the modernday master of the “old-school” animation style known as “stop-motion,” which Selick brought to the fore in his acclaimed debut feature film, “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” One of the most ancient forms of film animation, stop-motion, to this day, has a visceral, textured quality that sets it apart from digital creations. Looking for that kind of more vibrant effect for the LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou menagerie,
Anderson called Selick long in advance of the start of production to see if he would be
interested in applying his art to a seriocomic adventure film.

“Wes said he was looking for somebody who could create the kind of sea
creatures that would make for a fable-like atmosphere,” recalls Selick. “Right away, he
had very simple, clear, and endlessly creative, ideas about design and color, which I
found very refreshing. As I became more involved, I began to realize that the animation
in the film, unusual as it might be, is just one of the many spices in Wes’s stew. It’s a
subtle but important part of telling the incredible story of Steve Zissou.”

Selick soon found that for each of the world’s individual creatures—which also
include Day-Glo lizards, paisley octopi and iridescent mini-frogs—Anderson had very
specific portraits in mind. “For example, for the Sugar Crabs, he literally wanted
confectionary colors,” explains Selick, “so I brought him lots of entire catalogs of
candies, and he chose the colors and patterns he liked from that collection for us to
replicate.”

Selick continues: “Some of the creatures are total fabrications while others are
subtle yet fun shifts on real sea animals. The Golden Barracuda, for example, we took
from actual barracuda images and created a new interpretation of that familiar fish. But
the Rat Tail Envelope Fish, which turns itself inside out, is totally imaginary. We created
about 40 or 50 completely different designs for Wes to look at, and he was having so much fun with each of them that he wouldn’t let us stop! Finally, he picked the one he thought was the wildest vision.” Later, Selick joined cast and crew in Italy to oversee the sculpting of the miniature models and puppets that form the heart of stop-motion animation, which only intensified the creative process. “Every time I showed Wes an idea, he saw it as an opportunity to improve on it,” he recalls. “It was quite an intense period.” Indeed, of all the underwater fish, reptiles and mammals featured in THE LIFE AQUATIC, the only real animals seen that actually exist are Zissou’s whale (inserted using old-fashioned rear-projection); and the research dolphins—the bane of Zissou’s existence—which were created by using animatronic, remote-controlled robots.

Finally, it came time to create the film’s pie`ce de résistance and the ultimate object of Steve Zissou’s vengeance: the legendary jaguar shark. “The jaguar shark is sort of the great white whale of ‘Moby Dick’ in THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou,” observes Selick. “It’s a mythical creature that no one except Steve Zissou really believes in—so it needed to be something quite spectacular. Every week, the length seemed to grow as Wes wanted it to be even larger and more imposing. We ended up with 150 pounds of puppet, which might be the largest stop-motion puppet ever created.”

While stop-motion animation is typically low-tech—involving only lights, cameras and animators to slowly move the models frame-by-frame—for THE LIFE AQUATIC with Steve Zissou, Selick went further, using computer technology to amp up the process. “We used computer model movers to simulate the jaguar shark’s basic swimming motion while an animator hand created the mouth movements, the pectoral fins and all the extra things,” he explains.

Q: The production design of this film is very unique and quite different from your previous films. What kind of look were you hoping to create?
A: For one thing, there was just a ton of big stuff that we had to build: the interiors of the Belafonte, Hennessey’s underwater lab, the undersea forest. Also, I’ve always thought that it’s important that the actors feel like they’re in real settings, so they can kind of be absorbed by what’s around them . . . so we brought in [production designer]Mark Friedman because I needed somebody really strong who could go to Cinecitta in Rome and get it done.

Q: What about the cut-away of The Belafonte? Why did you choose to do that?
A: Really, that was something that inspired me to do the entire movie. I had been
thinking about how to do that for years and years and I knew it was going to be a huge effort to build something like that. We built it on the biggest stage they have at Cinecitta and it was like five stories tall. At first, we got our camera all the way back and it couldn't hold it all. So we opened up a side of the wall and got as far back as we could,and we still couldn't hold it. Then we got these machines that pushed the set four inches at a time over the course of a week all the way up against the wall. And finally, we got this lens from, like NASA or something -- the widest lens that you could get - and it just barely held it. And that's how we got our shot.

Q: It’s also a very colorful film . . . there’s blue everywhere.
A: Yeah, aquamarine. That was part of the game plan. I always have a palette of colors,
a certain range, worked out before I start shooting and I think it gives everything a kind
of coherent look.

Q: Why did you turn to stop-motion animation to create the sea creatures in the movie?
A: I was inspired by Henry Selick [director of “Nightmare Before Christmas”] and his
work with stop-motion. It’s an old-fashioned technique that really seems to fit with the
handmade feeling of the whole film.

Q: Music is always very important to your films. What was the concept for THE
LIFE AQUATIC?
A: The music we did with Mark Mothersbaugh started with just the little electronic stuff
like the song that plays in Steve Zissou’s helmet. And that was like this very funny, odd
cue that we expanded to be a whole adventure theme. That was the big thing for me – to
create a kind of adventure music that would fit the film.

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